“It wasn't that she romanticized the past or believed that things had been better long ago. She had been poor even in the Dominican Republic, but something had flourished from within which had enabled her to greet each day rathe rthan cringe from it in dread. With bare feet planted on familiar ground, she had trusted her perceptions. Yet assaulted by unfamiliar and surrounded by hard concrete and looming buildings, she had become as vulnerable as even the Trujillo regime had failed to make her feel.”

“So many lessons she had refused to learn because they had been taught to her by her mother. She recalled Bienvenida's claim that the devil was one's own fears called forth by self-doubt. Only now did she accept those words as truth. For too long she had relied on God to grant her peace, reluctant to believe that He, in His wisdom, had endowed the world and its creatures with the powers each needed to survive. It was these powers which she had spurned so many years before which her soul had ached for with a constancy that prayers had not soothed.”

“When classmates had presumed to know the inner workings of her race and class - inferring their inherent laziness, lack of motivation, welfare dependency and intellectual deficiency-she had stopped up her ears and gradually trained her eyes not to see. Yet rage had turned her body against itself, transforming her stomach into an acidic mass that heaved bitterness into her mouth.”

“It was as if, after years of setting aside memories,the pile had grown too high, and had tumbled, obliging her to take an inventory of her life.”

“As she had been walking from the ward to that room, she had felt such pure hatred that now she had no more rancor left in her heart. She had finally allowed her negative feelings to surface, feelings that had been repressed for years in her soul. She had actually FELT them, and they were no longer necessary, they could leave.”

“Like a sun: but a small sun, which she had within her, warming her from the inside out. She was conscious of a feeling she had had before, a sense that she was looking at him, and at all of them, from some far way off, or from a great height. There had been a time when she seemed to herself to be snug, and small, within the large house of Smokey, a safe inhabitant, room to run in yet never leave his encompassment. Now she oftener felt otherwise: over time it was he who seemed to have become a mouse within the house of her.”

“His passion she had expected, even his expertise, for a man of his years would not have been without women. She had even, in the long days of yearning, suspected his tenderness, which led him now to kiss her temples and the inner crook of her elbow with the same attention he gave to her lips and breasts. What she had not anticipated was that he would be vulnerable as well.”